A Bag of Bodies

By Richard Freeborn

Panic. Greed. Vengeance. Strong emotions and strong reasons for murder.

Guns, poisons, blunt instruments, and more feature in this collection of five original murder mysteries by international selling author, Richard Freeborn.

• The Pink Hat Puzzle
• TV Dinner
• The Death of an Artifact Collector
• The Maypole Murder
• Death in a Dobok

From an English village green to South Florida to a distant planet, murder knows no boundaries. It's time to pick your crime scene

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Freeborn
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958214022

Book preview

A Bag of Bodies

A BAG OF BODIES

RICHARD FREEBORN

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Pink Hat Puzzle

TV Dinner

The Death of an Artifact Collector

The Maypole Murder

Death in a Dobok

About the Author

Also by Richard Freeborn

For Natasha

INTRODUCTION

My first exposure to mysteries was the Enid Blyton Five Find-Outers series. I don't remember if I read all fifteen books in the series, but I probably did. I do recall moving many times with the stack of paperbacks that became more and more ragged until, finally, they became a collection of loose pages and had to leave.

After that, I moved on to the classics: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and of course Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. I have a hardback collection of all the Sherlock Holmes stories on my bookshelf that I occasionally dip into. I hesitate to list authors after that because I'm sure to miss one or more, having just realized I missed Dorothy L. Sayers in the list of classics. And yes, the writing style and cultural attitudes are very different from today, as I suspect we'll be saying about Tony Hillerman, J. D. Robb or James Lee Burke sixty or seventy years from now.

My mystery reading then, as now, covers pretty much every sub-genre from cozy to noir. I have no problem switching from one to the other depending on my mood.

Given the above, I guess it's no surprise a lot of my writing revolves around mysteries of some type - especially the stories set in ancient Babylon with Jacob and Miriam. Mostly these stories tend to fit into the soft-boiled category because currently my stories move too fast for cozy and aren't dark enough for hard-boiled or noir. I have written some of the latter, but they didn't fit in this collection.

So, where did these five stories come from?

The Pink Hat Puzzle came about from a friend's comment about a beachside restaurant in Lantana, Florida. It was one of those stories that almost wrote itself, and Dean Wesley Smith was kind enough to say it reminded him of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee. High praise, and I hope you agree with him.

One of my ways to relax is through cooking, especially when my Big Green Egg is involved. TV Dinner started out as a BBQ competition murder mystery. The problem was, I couldn't make it work, although there are several thousand words that might turn into something one day. It was only while wrangling a mole that bubbled, and popped, and spat all over the stove, with Guy Fieri in the background, that I worked out where this story was going.

Science fiction and mysteries have always had a close relationship, from Isaac Asimov to Robert J. Sawyer and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and that led me to several science fiction stories about a private investigator named Rhys. There's a lot I still don't know about Rhys and Death of an Artifact Collector was a way of looking at him through the eyes of another person.

Pre and Post COVID, my return trips to England seem to be early spring or late autumn. I'm still trying to work out why I subject myself to the damp and cold so prevalent at that time of year, but I do. It's probably something to do with cheaper flights and easier use of award points. These times of year also bring mornings of heavy dew and spooky mists that are almost fog. From that came The Maypole Murder.

The last story is thanks to my daughter, Natasha - and yes, the character's name is deliberate. Amongst her many other accomplishments, Natasha won a silver medal at the Choi Kwang Do world championships. For a while she seriously considered the idea of opening a Choi Kwang Do school. One evening we talked about the benefits and pitfalls of having a partner in the business. During the conversation, I had an idea. For many reasons, the school didn't work out for Natasha, but the idea remained, and the result is Death in a Dobok.

Looking back through these stories, I realized I have more stories about some characters, not just Rhys but Val and Lani, and the Reverend Mike Lawrence. I need to read through them again, and who knows, there might be enough for Another Bag of Bodies!

THE PINK HAT PUZZLE

It was two days before the official start of storm season and already the Hurricane Center had tracked two named storms off Florida’s east coast. The remnant of the last one was thumping heavy swells on the beach below me. The breeze was out of the east, damp and salty with the remnants of that second storm, making the white canvas awnings flap and crack, and grabbing at napkins, cutlery and condiments not securely held down.

The one advantage was that my beach bar, The Dune Crest, was nearly empty. The snowbirds had fled back to New York, and Michigan, and Quebec, and left South Florida to the people who lived here year round.

My friend Lani calls it the Quiet Time. She’s somewhere in her thirties, five six, a natural blonde with blue eyes, a body to match and is usually on the arm of a man with a net worth of at least a billion dollars. Half a billion when she’s slumming. She’s been to Mar-a-Lago so many times she should have her own parking space.

She was sitting opposite me that day, wearing something silk and tropical colored that probably cost what I’d paid for the bar. She was sipping on a club soda and watching a flock of the gulls tearing at something the waves had washed up on the beach twenty feet below us.

I’ve got twenty years on her, and should be happy with friendship, and I usually convince myself I am. Today wasn’t one of those days.

I’d tipped my rickety plastic chair onto its two back legs and rested my feet on the rough surface of the deck rail. The varnish had been scratched, scarred, and scuffed from the hundreds of bottles and glasses scraped across it. Eventually, I was going to have to replace the railing and many of the picnic style tables and benches, but not today.

Today was a day to kick back, sip another glass of iced vodka, and thank the weather gods for sending category one hurricane Bella out into the Atlantic.

The last of the customers left. Katie, my waitress, closed up and left me the keys. I wasn’t serving anyone else today except